Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday November 22, 2009 @09:16AM
from the yelling-match-begins-now dept.

jamie writes with this snippet from the UK's Independent:
"The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ... [The study] found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available. On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010."

CO2 is a molecule, containing one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. One CO2 molecule is indistinguishable from another[*], so in principle no there is no test to determine whether any particular CO2 molecule coems from a fossil fuel or from another source.

The obvious thing to do however is to measure and estimate the amount of man-made CO2, by summing up the CO2 emitted by smoke stacks, agriculture, forest clearing etc. Given this, I don't think anyone denies that the CO2 increase in the atmosphere comes from any natural source. In fact, so far the inceases in CO2 in the atmosphere has been less than humans have been emitting, due to some natural carbon sinks. For example, small amounts of carbon (but huge on a planetary scale) get dissolved in the oceans. These sinks have limits though, when the natural carbon sinks start to saturate it will only make the problem worse.

[*] Ok, a pedant might argue that it has some internal degrees of freedom, nuclear hyperfine levels etc, that are irrelevant here.

[*] Ok, a pedant might argue that it has some internal degrees of freedom, nuclear hyperfine levels etc, that are irrelevant here.

Actually, you needn't look to such minute differences. Different isotopes do react at slightly different rates, so biological processes often enrich molecules in one isotope over another. I don't know of any way to use this to trace CO2's source, but it has been used to chemically trace the earliest appearances of photosynthesis on Earth, for example.

That said, your post is right: you can reasonably accurately measure and sum the man-made carbon sources.

It is highly questionable whether this "pause" is even real. It does show up to some extent (no cooling, but reduced 10-year warming trend) in the Hadley Center data, but it does not show in the GISS data, see Figure 1. There, the past ten 10-year trends (i.e. 1990-1999, 1991-2000 and so on) have all been between 0.17 and 0.34 C per decade, close to or above the expected anthropogenic trend, with the most recent one (1999-2008) equal to 0.19 C per decade - just as predicted by IPCC as response to anthropogenic forcing.* [realclimate.org]

According to the GISS data (which takes the polar temperatures into consideration) the decadal trend over 1998-2009 is +0.19C! In light of the fact that the largest increases in temperatures have been observed at the poles, can you understand how a methodology which ignores polar temperatures might not give an accurate global picture of warming?

More importantly do you understand why your question, were it even true, is largely meaningless? If you don't yet understand that comparing the temperatures over a very few of the hottest decades on record (the 1990s and 2000s) has no significant bearing over a record stretching back a century and a half, I suggest you compare the last two decades to the 1890s and 1900s.

And how are world leaders likely to respond if the temperature drops during the 2010s?

Sadly the science tells us that is extrememly unlikely happen. But even if it did, world leaders should respond by accepting the advice of those who understand the statistical significance of any observed falls in trends as against the entire instrumental record. Perhaps you should work at gaining some such understanding yourself?

Oh yes, there are. The much quoted Australian denialist Ian Plimer, for instance, claimed very recently that "we cannot stop carbon emissions because most of them come from volcanoes". That is contradicted by isotopic evidence as well as emission accounting, but that doesn't stop him from saying it.

Some deny that CO2 causes warming. Some deny that temperatures are rising. Some deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Some deny that humans emit sign

Don't be distracted by absolute quantities. A non-car analogy. Imagine you have a funnel - 1 litre per second of water can pass through this funnel. Indeed, 1 litre per second is passing through it. Call that "nature". The level in the funnel remains the same, since it's draining at the rate that it's being filled. Then comes a human, and adds just 1ml per second (i.e. 0.1%). As surely as night follows day, the funnel begins to fill up until it eventually overflows.

Except in this analogy, not only do humans add 1ml extra input, they also reduce the exit of the funnel by 1ml/sec (reducing the "sink", in the real world, deforestation etc.)

Isotopic composition is a good test. For fossil carbon, all of the C-14 will have decayed, so if the fraction of C-14 has gone down over time then that's a good indicator that the increase is from a fossil fource.

One thing to remember, however, is that the carbon that is being dissolved into the oceans is doing huge amounts of damage to the ecosystems there. While the oceans have always pulled carbon into it, the vast increase in CO2 has led to the oceans becoming more acidic, which can cause the coral reefs to dissolve, which will lead to the destruction of the habitats of thousands of kinds of oceanic creatures, doing massive damage to the global ecosystem.

Prove it. Since CO2 levels have been higher in the past, it stands to reason that sealife is already adapted to higher levels of dissolved CO2 in seawater. Experts on the subject see no damage being specifically caused by CO2 in seawater. This is not to say that there is no pressing need for action on what happens in the ocean - pollution and fishing practices (like dredging and drag nets) are causing uncountable damage.

I could go on, but I have a feeling that it still wouldn't convince you. Global Warming is not a myth. True, the Earth does go through cycles. I don't dispute that. However, the rate of climate change is far faster than previous cyclic rates. The rate now versus that of the pre-industrial age is much, much faster. The global ecology cannot adapt fast enough to the change. What used to take thousands of years now takes hundreds, and increasingly, decades. There is plenty of research all around to find. Pretty much the only studies that disagree with the idea of global warming are those that are done by the oil companies and their allies.

What are you basing your statements on? Can you cite some research which isn't based on CRU's Hockey Stick graph which has been debunked and which clearly indicates that global warming is happening and it is not due to any natural geological cycle?

I am asking for research which indicates clearly that global warming is occurring due to humans and this research must not be based on CRU's data.

No, I am not quoting some idiot paid by oil companies to distort science, I think it is perfectly reasonable to cite researchers who have:

a) Placed their data onlineb) Placed the source of the programs they have written to arrive at the resultsc) Placed their detailed findings online

1. Do you think that it is even remotely possible that all of CRU's data was stored on a single storage medium and that ALL scientists who ever worked on the data, worked on this single storage - that too on the only master storage of data without ever taking any copies of this data?

2. Do you think that it is even remotely possible that all of CRU's data was lost despite the fact that the email log released yesterday includes emails even from the mid 1990s. Why is that email was backed up while the rest of the data was lost?

3. Why is that even reputed magazines such as Nature and Science who have policies on data retention for all articles published in them didn't either a) Get the data from CRU or b) Retain this data - despite it being their own policy?

4. Why isn't CRU releasing the raw data even now - despite all the controversy and wide-spread feeling that the research is flawed?

Also, I would be interested in hearing a response from CRU on the email sent to CRU by Fred Pearce from New Scientist as early as 1996.

What are you fucking talking about? "Can you cite some research which isn't based on CRU's Hockey Stick graph"?!? Are you saying that climate scientists aren't researching climate, but the tens of thousands of them around the world are just looking at a graph one person did a decade ago and nodding their heads? This is beyond ridiculous. Who mods this shit up?

Thanks for the name calling. I guess people like you out there are getting a little concerned now that your schemes are coming out to the open.

Question for you:

1) To use your capitalization PEER REVIEW doesn't mean squat if the PEERS don't have the data that you did your research on.. Or by PEER REVIEW does it mean reviews by those who agree with you on anything and won't need any RAW DATA to arrive at their findings? Are you saying that these PEERS were actually given the DATA? How is that possible? Wasn't the DATA protected by the frigging IP laws that you keep spouting about?

2) Why is that the IP laws suddenly didn't apply when the Royal Society of Biological Sciences forced Briffa to release the data after he published an article in their journal? This data was analyzed to obtain quite a different result from what Briffa published.. Also this data clearly indicated that Briffa had used data from very few cores and there was indication that the data had been massaged to arrive at a pre-determined result.

3) Why should I give a rats ass about your IP rights and take your word for it when you publish a "finding"? Give me the data and the methodology that you used to arrive at the finding.. but don't give me this BS that I am supposed to accept their findings because they *said so*.

Would you be ok with the Election Office claiming that the election data cannot be released but this Candidate A did actually win the election?

4) This is publicly funded research. If that doesn't imply that the data should be available, what does?

5)

1. Do you think that it is even remotely possible that all of CRU's data was stored on a single storage medium and that ALL scientists who ever worked on the data, worked on this single storage - that too on the only master storage of data without ever taking any copies of this data?

However, the rate of climate change is far faster than previous cyclic rates.

There have been at least 60 previous cycles, ranging between 500 and 2500 years. How do you know that the rate is "far faster" than the rate in any previous cycle? I mean, c'mon, pull the other one -- it's got bells on.

So, if you were to do some research that went against the religion of anthrogenic global warming, exactly WHO is going to pay for it? You're not going to get it published anywhere, because it's heresy, so you can't use it towards getting tenure. You've GOT to get it paid-for by somebody, and the only people willing to fund such research are the oil companies and their allies. So the fact that science that contradicts AGW is paid-for by them in NO WAY undermines the quality of the research. Find another reason to dismiss it (like that it goes against your religion to believe that man isn't responsible for the warming).

How does it stand to reason?Methane and cyanogen levels were enormously higher during the immediate post Hadean era, and remained somewhat high all the way to the precambrian. Does that say anything about modern life-forms tolerances for Cyanide? Oxygen levels were lower in the Cambrian, does that mean that modern life could get by just fine on 11% atmospheric O2? They reached 24% or so during the Jurassic. Does that mean modern forests wouldn't have massive wildfire problems if they rose that high again in your lifetime?
If you're going to throw around nebulous terms such as "the past" and "higher", don't you think you should know how long in the past, or how much higher, before you try to reason about it.

That's a theory, and not the only one. Seeing something in a documentary isn't proof. Many "documentaries" are fictions arguing for a particular fact. This isn't reprehensible if they are clear about what they're doing, but they should almost never be accepted as fact. In this case probably at the time the documentary was made that was the only respectable theory, or at least so dominant that it was reasonable to ignore competing theories. But times change, and I believe that now the two respectable competing theories argue origin from protozoa vs. from largely inorganic processes (starting with larger chunks of organics). (All current theories derive the origin via a mixture of organic and inorganic processes...but they vary a lot on the details. E.g., one theory finds the origin in subduction trenches.)

So don't set your mind in stone based on a current belief at any one time. What that is is a measure of probability based on known current information, and that changes over time.

Global Average Temperature often fluctuates by over.2C year on year. This is more a question of weather than climate. Cherry-picking various number over short term periods is more a sales job that a serious data point (Wall St excels at doing this.)

Note that increasing CO2 and smog output may even lower temperatures in the short-term. Then the smog settles out, while the CO2 remains the gift that keeps on giving in terms of planetary warming.

Who knows what world leaders will do? Cheapest thing is probably just to beef up their militaries and shoot incoming refugees.

I have no idea what impact +100 ppm CO2 will have on the planet, and neither do most people.I still remember sitting in school and being lectured about Global Cooling, and how we needed to stop driving cars to reduce the amount of "dust" in the air.

Could be lots of reasons. For instance, we've witnessed accelerating melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Melting ice absorbs a lot of heat. More heat being used to melt large ice sheets means the temperature increase may stall until the ice sheets are fully melted. Also, 10 years worth of stalled heating isn't necessarily indicative of anything. It could just be natural climate fluctuations superimposed on a large slow rise in temperature. The five-year average shows little to buck the warming trend.

Even the Climate Change Congress now acknowledges this (quote: "temperature has plateaud"). Why?

Because its main motivation is to understand exactly what's going on with the climate. It doesn't have a political agenda. The best data right now suggests that the climate is getting warmer and that a probable reason for that is anthropogenic CO2. If new data comes in that suggests this is not the case, the IPCC and other climate change panels will have to acknowledge it.

And how are world leaders likely to respond if the temperature drops during the 2010s?

You say that as if they've responded thus far. As far as I can tell, the developing world is completely exempt from any decision on climate change, and various other efforts to get world leaders to acknowledge and act on climate change have garnered meager changes in policy at best. Face it: if the world is in danger and we're looking to our leaders to save the day, we're screwed. The best bet on climate change is to alter the individual consumer's behavior.

Examine the data, and get back to me with the answer to this question: based on the data (and not on the opinions of some pundit telling you what to think), would you personally sign on to a statement that the global average temperate is dropping?

To be moderately serious, people are tropical apes. People can survive much warmer weather. It's not at all clear that the same is true of civilization. If sea levels rise, coastal cities will have problems, but not as much as the folk living in low-lying internal areas. Like the San Joaquin Valley, the Mississippi Valley, central South America, central Siberia (is that the Volga? I can't keep my Asiatic rivers straight), Around the Caspian

True, I had completely forgotton about isotopes. But I'm doubtful that you could turn this into a useful test of atmosphereic CO2 composition

Well, you can. Fossil fuel has (nearly) no C14, as C14 is generated in the atmosphere and decays quickly. Fossil fuel has very little C13, as biological processes in most plants prefer C12 to C13, and fossil fuels are created from previous animal (i.e. recycled plant) and plant matter. Yes, the total carbon flux is much bigger than the human contribution, but we can measure isotope ratios very precisely. This was predicted and measured quite a while before global warming became a significant concern, as it also puts C14 ages off if not corrected for. See Suess effect [wikipedia.org], named after the chemist who described this in the 1950s.

Yes, they can measure the concentration of the isotope carbon-14 [newscientist.com]. But even if we couldn't do so, what else do you think would make the concentration of carbon dioxide increase from about 285 ppm to about 385 ppm in just over 100 years?

I think they are basing the CO2 increases on fossil fuel use increases. I don't find the methodology in the article, but by looking at the number of new power plants going on line, and the number of existing ones, it should be pretty easy to get a fairly accurate number.

Regardless, it's a pretty depressing article. And it doesn't mention the methane hydrates that are starting to thaw and bubble up in the northern latitudes. That has the potential to push warming even higher and what is being forecast is already going to be disastrous to every living thing on the planet.

People around now are going to have things bad enough after the next few decades. After that, well, I hope you like Mel Gibson Road Warrior movies...

Have they factored in Global Dimming [wikipedia.org] though? As the pollution increases, the extra particulate matter in the atmosphere relects sunlight away from the earth. This process is one of the few negative feedback loops that occurs when we increase pollution.

I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but if we increased the amount of particulate matter in our pollution, we could reverse the warming trend.

I sort of believe in climate change, but at this point in time, a day after we all got to learn that the top-institute for climate-change knowingly and willingly changed the numbers, lied... I can not take this serious. First I want to know how much has been fabricated and lied. After that, I might support this type of research again, but only after all the liars are banned from 'research'.

I don't think Global Warming (as it was sold to us, no bait and switch Climate Change) is poor science at best. Too much money and politics are involved; when Al Gore and Goldman Sachs agree on something you know it's very very bad. GOOD SCIENCE is all I ask for, which mean never hear the words ''the debate is over''. Here is a link to an article from the WSJ on hacked emails showing scientists deliberately manipulating data to get results they want. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.ht [wsj.com]

A partial review of the emails shows that in many cases, climate scientists revealed that their own research wasn't always conclusive. In others, they discussed ways to paper over differences among themselves in order to present a "unified" view on climate change.

On at least one occasion, climate scientists were asked to "beef up" conclusions about climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials in one country were planning a "big public splash."

More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of their papers. The hacked folder is labeled "FOIA," a reference to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.

Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was intellectual property.

And people claim copyright/IP laws cause no harm. Science is worthless if you can't have review of the data and verifiability

I don't know... To me, that article just says that there are a lot of e-mails going back and forth between climate scientists. Which makes sense. The hacked e-mails are between co-workers after all. It says they disagreed with each other, but that the disagreements were small enough that they could agree on a common message. It says that one scientist was asked to beef up his conclusions to aid in making a bigger public splash. There's nothing wrong with that. A paper is like an essay. You make different points with different amounts of stress depending on what message you're trying to convey and what you can back up by reference or evidence.

What the article does NOT say is that there is any proof of people tampering with results. The article also doesn't say that anyone over-stated or exaggerated anything. Though, it sounds like Santax might have read another article that does have stronger proof? (Can you post that? I haven't read it)

I believe the climate change scientists know what they are doing. Group-think does exist, and entire groups of scientists have been shown to be wrong. But this is the exception, not the rule. I want to present another anecdote. The surgeon general first announced that smoking had negative effects on health in 1964. It's the surgeon general's job to announce some semblance of a consensus of the opinions of all the medical researchers in the United States. How long did it take before the majority of people believed in this message? How many decades were there doctors actively trying to 'disprove' the link between smoking and lung cancer? And, we're talking about something that's easy to prove. The effects of one object on an individual organism. There's almost no wiggle-room to throw in a wrench of doubt into that picture. It doesn't take very many people to throw mud at a consensus of ten thousand scientists.

It's even better - the source cited in the story above is the CRU (funny how "University of East Anglia" started being the source when everyone found out that CRU was more than a bit corrupt) - the same people who just got busted with all of that leaked data and incriminating emails just this week.

So they apparently decided to double down on their predictions, instead of trying to pretend nothing happened - but hiding the provenance.

Anyone want to bet the lead author on the paper wasn't the lead author last

Having read that story, I saw no evidence that they lied or changed number. They discussed how to spin their results so as their findings wouldn't be used by the opposition to score political points and they discussed politics (including how to marginalize an opponent). But nowhere did I see evidence that they lied or fabricated numbers. Do you have proof that they did?

After that, I might support this type of research again, but only after all the liars are banned from 'research'.

Did you even support it in the first place? Your tone makes me suspect not and that the above sentence is a rhetorical flourish to make your refusal sound more reasonable.

How about this story [squarespace.com]. The emails hint at two crimes, tax evasion in Russia and deleting data to dodge a freedom of information request (Jones did happen to "lose" the data and was unable to fulfill a freedom of information request. If the email is true, he discussed deleting the data prior to the "accident").

Moving on there are several instances where the emails imply manipulating the data to reduce undesired features like the Medieval Warm period or recent cooling. And they of course attacked several journals that published certain rivals.

If these emails turn out correct, it shows a serious disregard for the scientific process among a number of top researchers in the field, opens up a void in historical world temperature measurements (Jones and Mann apparently owned most of the data for that), and perhaps even jail time for someone.

That's not what we "learned." The information coming from the hacked emails is ambiguous at worst and probably tells us nothing more than that scientists are humans. There's no serious evidence of falsifying data. If you believe there is, out with it, please.

Scientists, schmientists. It's all a big conspiracy by liberal scientists who foolishly rely on reason and observation, renouncing all faith in our energy industry, the Republican Party, and God Himself. Don't tell me what these idiot climatologists say; they are far too tainted by having studied this stuff for much of their adult lives. When Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity, and Palin speak, we'll finally know the truth!

The prediction of an increase in concentration in carbon dioxide predates the 1970s. Arrhenius first predicted it in the 19th century [wikipedia.org]. That's why Keeling [wikipedia.org] started measuring the concentration on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the 1950s. In 1979, the Jason Committee [washingtonpost.com] predicted a doubling in the concentration of carbon dioxide and a warming of several degrees Celsius by 2035. At this point, we have decades of data confirming these predictions.

Computer modelling has added nothing to this. No computer model had produced better results than simply drawing a straight line through the graph.

What computer modeling has added is that there are not subtle effects that were not in the simpler models that will significantly alter the warming. For example, it has been hypothesized that certain types of clouds will cancel out most of the warming, or that other types of clouds will cause even more warming that previously predicted. The newest models and data show that the previous predictions are pretty accurate.

As far as your assertion that these models are untested, you completely wrong. These models have predicted warming for over a century, and we've been seeing that warming since the 1970s. We have decades of evidence that confirm the models. The fact that people continue to say the models are "untested" is why we need to have more stories about the matter.

It is not only the estimates of temperature increase that are rising, but so are the uncertainties. We know very little about how the feedback cycles work once the temperature changes so many degrees, and we know next to nothing about how they work when faced with such quick changes.
We do not know how much methane hydrate [wikipedia.org] there is stored on the ocean floor, but we do know there is a lot of it and that an eruption [wikipedia.org] of it 55 million years ago was at least in part responsible for a 6 degree C rise in global temperatures. It is also thought that the biggest mass extinction event ever [wikipedia.org] was caused by massive volcanism and methane hydrate release.
There is plenty of evidence that large parts of the ocean can and have previously become anoxic [wikipedia.org] during climate changes. This is really bad news not only for everything that lives in the ocean, but also for us since a large part of our food supply comes from the ocean.

Basically, we are getting into a territory where all bets are off, and it is not good news for humanity. I am linking to wikipedia since that is good place to start to read up on this stuff and find links to the actual research.

Why do people use the term Global Warming. It is a misleading term that does not properly identify what is happening to our planet. The fact is that the atmosphere is variable and will continue to fluctuate in terms of average temperature.

The real problem we are facing is rising sea TEMPERATURES. Here's just one technical article that studies the effects of rising sea temperatures on phytoplankton on Australia's coastline: http://www.int-res.com/articles/feature/m394p001.pdf [int-res.com] If you search the http://www.int-res.com/ [int-res.com] site you'll find a lot more really technical research articles that are great reads if you like this stuff:)

Rising sea temperatures mess up the sea currents and make fish search out better habitats (or die), perhaps because of the rising temperature itself, or maybe because their food supply is damaged (due to phytoplankton dieoff). If something doesn't change soon, we are in danger of losing vast populations in the ocean. This will have huge repercussions on our global food supply.

In the end, it doesn't matter if we are the ones causing it, or the sun is. Who cares. It is a complex system, and you can prove, through science, that carbon emissions directly affect sea temperatures. Maybe it's miniscule. Maybe it's not, but we have to do something or we are in severe danger of entirely losing our oceans.

Imagine if the seafood industry went belly up. It would cause a worldwide depression the likes of which we have not seen or dreamed of, especially for areas that depend heavily on the ocean for their nation's food supply.

AT THE VERY LEAST, if we are not going to reduce carbon emissions or whatever we can to reduce the effect on oceans, we need to have an actionable plan for what to do once the oceans die. Because it will happen if this trend continues. Having a plan doesn't mean it's going to be used, but we need to be able to continue functioning as a species if it does!

>>Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.

Yes, as we all know from Al Gore's memorable definition of what a "non-linear system" is: "It's a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come suddenly in big jumps."

I used to work doing modeling of both ocean seawater and other things (like heart cells or full cardiac cycles) which attempted to accurately simulate whatever ODE or whatever it was we were simulating. These models were incredibly sensitive to the various constants used, and what the starting assumptions were. They'd fly off into incoherent-land if these values were not very precise, or if the constants didn't match each other. The only way we could calibrate or test our simulation was by, say, pulling out a rabbit's heart, wiring it up, flooding it with some solution, and having the severed heart beat for us when driven by impulses at different frequencies and amplitude. Testing and experimentation is the only way to truly know something, as Feynman said. If we just relied on the models without doing followup experimentation with them, we'd have gotten wildly inaccurate results.

Climatology, on the other hand, is "science-y", but not really science. It wants to be science, it really does - and goes through the window dressings of having peer reviewed journals and conferences and all of that - but ultimately it is not science. There is no experimentation involved (or if you will, there is one large experiment running all the time), and there is no control for the experiment. Forgive me if I do not allow your models to substitute for actual experimentation, for the reasons listed above.

As one of my professors once said, never listen to anyone who claims to be really accurate over the sample data set. It's real easy to be accurate on a sample data set. Hell, you can always just spit back out the original numbers if you want - for my neural net spam filter, we could have just returned the classifications of each email and claimed 100% accuracy, for example. If you don't think that climate researchers actually make bullshit claims like this, check out the wikipedia page on global climate modeling, and look at, say, this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GCM_temp_anomalies_3_2000.jpg [wikipedia.org] There's charts like that everywhere on wikipedia, showing how accurate the climate models are, even back in 1930, decades before the models were created.

What is important is the accuracy going forward into new data, and as they do, they've found numerous glaring problems with the predictive ability of climate models (such as rainfall changes being 25% of what is expected). (For some fun laughs, read predictions of what life would be like in 2010 written 10, 20 or 30 years ago.)

The simple fact of the matter is, I don't believe any (self-described) scientist who claims he knows how much temperature will move in the next 100 years, unless he says it will range somewhere between absolute zero and the temperature of the sun.

And if it sounds like I'm picking on climate "scientists", well, I am, but I had a number of friends who worked in the field at SIO, and they're generally smart and nice guys, and think there's a serious problem. Their problem lies in claiming more knowledge than they actually know. (Again, this is not how actual science works.) And it's not like other fields have looked enviously at the tremendous success of real scientific fields, like physics, over the last hundred years. Psychology, sociology, hell even scientology and philosophy have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves. (Nearly every modern philosopher since Wittgenstein calls themselves an analytic philosopher, which was a movement to directly make philosophy more "scientific" and less heads-in-the-cloudsy.)

Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.

So it can be an exponential function, whatever, but you can either give me intermediate steps of some kind between now and 6C, perhaps by year, or certainly by decade, or you cannot. If you cannot, then quit trying to pretend that 6C actually means something because it means your number is crap. If you want me to believe in it, then that's fine, but y

It's evident there is a 'leftwards' lean in a large part (if not the majority) of the subscribers of this site.

It sounds like you are suggesting that global warming is a matter of opinion. Why would people on the left want there to be global warming? If there were any compelling arguments against global warming I would celebrate (you would probably call me a leftie -- I am European).

It is also interesting that in almost all of the world, this issue doesn't have the political dimension it seems to have in the USA. Parties are discussing how to deal with global warming. The right wing generally wants do to slightly less, the left and greens more. But they all agree that this is a reality we need to do something about.

Or because they love the sense of control that comes from telling people what they can do, what kinds of cars they can drive (ever wonder why we don't have station wagons any more?), while being blissfully hypocritical about the whole thing.

Is there some reason you picked the Channel TLT data and not the, say, Channel TLS data which reports a negative 0.325 K/decade?

The TLT channel is for lower troposphere and it is, indeed, the closest to ground level.

Satellite temperatures are better for climate purposes because ground stations temperatures also pick up heat radiated from the ground and other buildings. Indeed, one of the great points of criticism made about global climate is weather or not the current level state of ground measuring statem

You're confusing weather forecasting and climatology. They aren't the same thing. An analogy (not using cars this time): imagine you have a pot of water on the stove, and the temperature turned to a certain point. The weather forecaster is the person who predicts where the eddies and bubbles will be in this pot of water. Obviously this gets incredibly difficult for predictions more than a few seconds in the future. The climatologist, however, says "after X time, the temperature will have changed to Y", or "

"For many years to come one will wonder if the data presented to support claims such as this has been "tricked" to conform to someone's belief instead of representing reality."

No, for many years the oil industry will keep paying supposed grassroot organisations to spread uncertainty and doubt about this issue. Especially in the US many non-climate-specialists want to believe it or they Way of Life (TM) would be seriously modified.

The trick is just a word used in a private mail to indicate a nice method. It

Allow me to extensively quote John Cook (http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-do-the-hacked-CRU-emails-tell-us.html), as he is closer to the topic than I am.

What do the suggestive "tricks" and "hiding the decline" mean? Is this evidence of a nefarious climate conspiracy? "Mike's Nature trick" refers to the paper Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries (Mann 1998 http://www.elmhurst.edu/~richs/EC/FYS/Mannetal.OriginalPaper.pdf [elmhurst.edu]), published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann. The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.

The "decline" refers to the "divergence problem". This is where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed as early as 1998, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692171/pdf/43XA8LK6PCMVMH9H_353_65.pdf [nih.gov]). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 ( http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/741/2008/cpd-4-741-2008.pdf [clim-past-discuss.net] ) which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature.

When you read through the many global warming skeptic arguments ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php [skepticalscience.com] ), a pattern emerges. Each skeptic argument misleads by focusing on one small piece of the puzzle while ignoring the broader picture. To focus on a few suggestive emails while ignoring the wealth of empirical evidence for

I'm not taking up the questions of whether global warming is a fact, or whether it is primarily caused by CO2, or whether human activity is directly responsible.
I was making an ad hominem, and questioning whether certain scientists are credible. It was not directly about whether their conclusions happen to be accurate, but about whether we can trust them on face-value.
This was, I believe, also the OP's point: Can we trust this report or is it spun to fit an agenda.
The fact is that global warming has unf

Try reading that again: "adding in the real temps [...] to hide the decline."

So, it is some kind of proxy for measuring the historical temperatures (in this case, tree rings), and this proxy data, for some completely different reason (pollution affecting the tree growth, for example??), shows a decline in the last couple of decades.

The real temperatures (ie, the ones that are actaully measured, like with a thermometer) show an increase, so use the real measurements for the final 20 years of the data.

There would be more of a problem if this wasn't disclosed somewhere. But even then, it is an argument about how the proxy data is presented. The real temperature data doesn't show a decline.

Try reading that again: "adding in the real temps [...] to hide the decline."

So, it is some kind of proxy for measuring the historical temperatures (in this case, tree rings), and this proxy data, for some completely different reason (pollution affecting the tree growth, for example??), shows a decline in the last couple of decades.

The real temperatures (ie, the ones that are actaully measured, like with a thermometer) show an increase, so use the real measurements for the final 20 years of the data.

These so-called "scientists" actually went to the other extreme by trying to hide the divergence and present a view that was not supported by their actual research.

That is BS. If you bothered to read the refutations, the divergences are themselves a subject of many publications, and this has been out in the open forever.

I do agree that access to the raw data could be better, and even that some of the statistical methods etc have been applied poorly (or even incorrectly). You might even find, somewhere in the stack of tens of thousands of climate science publications, some that misrepresent the data, perhaps even deliberately. Not all scientists are as expert as they should be in statistics, and scientists are human and have human frailties (although that doesn't excuse anything). But this does not appear to be one of those cases. You are reading far too much into one email, and you clearly are not aware of the context.

If all of the science of global climate change depended on a single set of proxy data, then you would have a point. But it doesn't, and you don't.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

This will indeed cause certain people to "wonder". Especially people who do not have the faculties to properly understand the idiomatic uses of the English language, and people who are willing to take words and phrases of out of context, as well as people who are willing to formulate their opinions without considering the actual analysis and instead relying on secondhand hysteria generated by others who are also not willing to consider the actual analysis.

What I do understand is that he is comparing things that aren't comparable. He inferred temperatures using one measurement metric and, since that measurement metric wasn't convenient in a specific interval, mixed that data with data from a completely different measurement method in that interval. Then he uses that to extrapolate global trends based on inconsistent data.

What makes him think that since the measurement method is unreliable for the last 20 years, it is reliable for the rest of the time period hundreds of years back? It throws his entire theory out of the window. He is doing specious reasoning by cherry picking the results that fit his theory better.

In experimental science, this is not uncommon. Using different methods of analyzing the same subject is, in other words, using (relatively) independent methods to analyze that subject. Using multiple independent methods and combining their results is a good thing, because it avoids experimental error and potential systemic biases that exist in every observational setup.

That said, I don't want to get into an actual discussion about the actual paper in question because I have not read the relevant hacked personal e-mails with their full context and interpreted their significance (and I likely won't have time in the near future given the pressures of day to day life). I am not particularly inclined to start implying conclusions and accusations based off of an incomplete and shoddy reading of a few out-of-context paragraphs. I am neither willing to vouch for or defend, or attack a particular piece of research until I am reasonably well informed about how that research was conducted.

There seem to be many people, however, who are willing to do exactly that.

This isn't a case of correlating multiple measurement techniques that suggest the same thing. In fact, it was quite the opposite: the authors stitched together data that showed what they wanted it to show and threw out the rest.

Using multiple independent methods and combining their results is a good thing, because it avoids experimental error and potential systemic biases that exist in every observational setup.

This is definitely not a good thing.

Yes, it is good to validate one group of results gathered through one method by comparing them to another group of results gathered by another method. The problem is when you combine the two sets of data together. It is very easy to produce odd artifacts that way and it should be avoided at all costs. Differences in sample sizes, data collection methods, instrumentation, and other unknown and unintended introduced variables means that the combined data set is often muc

This is not experimental science. Experimental science involves performing an *experiment* with varying initial parameters, measuring the results and then arriving at a correlation.

In this specific case, we are talking about measuring tree rings in Yamal - this is purely an *observational* science as the scientist isn't actually performing any experiment but just documenting observed trends.

When you are observing trends, it is disingenuous, to include readings from a completely different set of subjects in a study which does not reference them so that the results tie into a specified hypothesis.

This is deliberate mangling of data to serve an agenda. Let us not grace this by calling it a science - and especially not an experimental science

Only those who read one sentence, and never bother to read anything else. Some of the data from a previous paper was found to be faulty, and a method of adjusting to show a longer term trend based on several data source was required. Not only is this not unheard of, it is a routine technique in studies where some data cannot be duplicated -- such as a temperature reading.

Speaking of warping science to conform to a belief, why is it that so many people are so eager to believe global warming skeptics? M

There was 4.7 times more CO2 in the atmosphere during the Jurassic period than now. Besides most CO2 does not come from fossil fuel burning. Natural sources are 20 times greater than sources due to human activity. CO2 is not poisonous. We are at a greater risk from an impact event such as the one at Tunguska than something like this.

Do we believe NASA when they say 2008 was the coolest since 2000? Is that just a tooth in the saw? Which trend to you believe? The one that shows temperatures generally increasing since 1880? Are the relatively flat temperatures between 1950 and 1980 an anomaly? Is it really correct to even assume the overall trend is anthropogenic? Or do we need to do some fancy footwork to make the data fit the hypothesis?

If anything, that's the real black eye that the recent data swipe reveals. The emails between AGW scientists specifically mention bullying publications into not accepting/publishing papers that don't support AGW, and subsequently use the lack of published, peer-reviewed articles against those scientists whose conclusions differ from their own.

Though a bit uglier than usual, that type of behavior is fairly prevalent in the scientific community. Articles in "unpopular" topics have always tended to get sidelined (reviewers can reject papers simply on the premise that they're not on a topic a journal would wish to publish, for example), and it's easy to see how this can progress to choosing a side in a scientific debate.

Though a model more in-line with arXiv might mitigate this, I think it represents a fundamental flaw in the currently-used system of peer review: it's essentially a binary threshold. Either your paper is accepted and you have a voice in the scientific community, or it's rejected and you have none. Something along the lines of a Slashdot or Digg-style moderation may work much better: other researchers can mod you down all they wish and send it to the last page of a query, but they can't actually make your work disappear. And since the ranking is relative to other relevant papers, unpopular topics and positions would not be penalized relative to each other using such a system.

You could even generate confidence intervals for the rankings based on the number of reviews. Right now a decision on a paper is based on 2 or 3 reviews at most, and it would be difficult for a more open system not to exceed this.

And you're more qualified then most other people to be able to interpret a basic line graph?

I'm just putting this out there because you slamming a very large and ever growing crowd by calling them ignorant, unqualified and knuckle-dragging. You also go further and tell them their views don't count in this debate. And yet I don't see why I should value your views and opinions any more then I should theirs. What makes you so much better?

So...basically...we're all going to die, and take the planet with us, right?

It's certainly a given that we're all going to die, sometime. Hopefully not all at the same general time, but who knows.

My impression from this whole "climate change" thing is that coastline dwellers are screwed, as is anyone who lives on a floodplain (but that's usually an annual given), weather patterns are going to change dramatically enough that our capacity for predicting it will suffer (as if to say weathermen now have a bon

Exactly. That's why countries are trying to agree to cut emissions. It needs the cooperation of at least China and the U.S. That's why the climate bill that's before the U.S. Senate is such a big deal. Without a climate bill, the U.S. cannot commit to cutting emissions, and so other countries aren't willing to do so either.

And we know it's not an increase in solar output causing the warming we've observed.

Sorry, we do not know that. The conclusion that it cannot be because of the sun is based on space-based measurements of the total solar irradiance (TSI). These found a fairly stable 1365 W/m^2 (see for example here [wattsupwiththat.com]). But these measurements are wrong! Why? Because the EUV and X-ray part of the solar spectrum is not included.

Take for example ACRIMSAT [nasa.gov]. It is sensitive only down to 200 nm and as such it wholly misses out on

Uh, what does that fluctuation in that plot prove? The change is less than a W/m^2, if I'm doing my math right (out of a total insolation of 1300 W/m^2) and x-rays and EUV don't make it to the surface of the Earth anyway. (This is why astronomers keep launching those telescopes into space, remember.)

Honestly, i don't get the 'hoax' tag, the doom&gloom tag or even fear mongering could be seen as appropriate, but hoax?

Some emails were leaked on Friday from the climate research unit at the university of East Anglia. In about 150 megabytes of text, it turned out that in one of the emails, one of the researchers used the word 'trick' to describe some unspecified method of statistical analysis he had used on some dataset, and mentioned that it would 'hide the decline'. Everyone immediately saw that obviously this trick was dishonest and the decline in question was a real decline in temperatures, and it means that the entire field of climate science has been perpetrating a decades-long hoax on the world, and Al Gore should be tried for treason. Because you don't need any kind of context to know exactly what the word 'trick' refers to and what 'decline' is being hidden and why; your pre-existing political beliefs tell you all you should need to know.

That's why articles about climate change can expect to be tagged with such things for quite some time into the future.

It's a lot more than that. You can see people conspiring to delete data which might impugn their conclusion, and they're trying to do it before they can be hit by a freedom of information request. Criminal conspiracy to hide publicly-funded data by destroying it, hmmmm? Prosecutors in the UK should definitely be hitting these folks with an order not to destroy any data nor to delete any emails, and then they should be seeking a copy of the emails directly from the site.

If an African nation is permitted emission levels of ~zero (because they aren't emitting anything right now) while a Western nation is permitted to emit say 20% less than what they emitted in 1990, which one will win in the global economy? If the rich Western countries can't afford to use green technology, how can a poor African nation afford them?

Africa doesn't get to industrialize while polluting like mad bastards would be much better. Ditto for China.

China isn't polluting, compared to Europe or USA. Its per capita emissions are 1/4 of those of the US. When the US has cut its emissions in half it can start talks with the rest of the world.

You do realize that there are health and life insurance industries that will do everything they can to prevent this?

Life insurance companies will be very much in favor of longer lifespans. For health insurance companies it depends on whether you're in good health for the extra years; if so, it will benefit them as well.

You don't even want to hide how incredibly dumbfuckingblindedly biased you are?

Heres a tip. Stop paying attention to sites that moderate content by deleting dissenting opinions, run by people who delete data in order to hide problems with their work, and even plots to ruin the credibility of peer reviewed journals that publish articles with dissenting views.

When was the last time any of these guys actually performed the scientific method? Instead of doing science, they fuck around in another discipline